This project involves two longitudinal studies, one being conducted in Sweden and the other in Berlin. The longitudinal study in Sweden was designed to elucidate the effects of center day care, family day care, and home care on the development of 145 children recruited in 1982 at an average of 16 months of age. Initial multivariate analyses indicated that type of care had no reliable impact on child development, but that the quality of home care and the quality of alternative care had substantial effects on the children's verbal abilities, social skills, and personal maturity, as assessed by measures of field-independence, ego-control, and ego-resilience. Subsequent analyses of data gathered shortly after the children started school indicated that cognitive development as well as personal maturity were affected by the children's varying child-care histories. Specifically, family daycare had modest but significant negative effects on both verbal abilities and personal maturity, whereas center-based care has beneficial effects in both domains. The effects of the quality of home and alternative care appeared to diminish as the children moved into the formal educational system. These children are currently being reassessed at 15 years of age, and analyses of the data obtained from interviews with the parents and children as well as from official school records will begin in FY98. In the Berlin study, researchers are assessing the psychophysiological and behavioral tendencies of infants at home in order to assess the effects of prior individual differences in emotional reactivity and infant-mother attachment on the adaptation to out-of-home center care. Data collection has now been completed, and data reduction and analysis are under way. Preliminary analysis indicate that the quality of infant-careprovider attachment is affected by the quality of their interaction, rather than by the quality of the prior infant-mother attachments. The quality of infant-careprovider relations, along with the infants' temperaments, appeared to shape the adaptation to daycare. Detailed observations showed that the total amounts of social interaction experienced over the coders of a day did not differ regardless of enrollment in daycare.
| Ahnert, Lieselotte; Gunnar, Megan R; Lamb, Michael E et al. (2004) Transition to child care: associations with infant-mother attachment, infant negative emotion, and cortisol elevations. Child Dev 75:639-50 |
| Ahnert, Lieselotte; Lamb, Michael E (2003) Shared care: establishing a balance between home and child care settings. Child Dev 74:1044-9 |
